


babylon

by MathildaHilda



Category: IT - Stephen King
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Internalized Homophobia, Period-Typical Homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-27
Updated: 2019-09-27
Packaged: 2020-10-29 09:53:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20794718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MathildaHilda/pseuds/MathildaHilda
Summary: Beep Beep, Richie.





	babylon

_They’re just dreams_, he muses in the quiet of the night after yet another woman has walked out the door, never to come back.

She hasn’t left because he doesn’t love her. She’s left because he knows, deep down, that he can’t love her the way she _wants_ him to love her.

They’re just dreams. Everyone has dreams, and everyone has dreams they don’t remember.

But, he’s always wondered just exactly how many people have dreams that leave one terrified and sweat soaked, long after the they’ve woken up and forgotten the dream entirely.

_They’re not dreams_, he muses before Mike calls. _They’re fucking nightmares._

The boy isn’t faceless most of the time.

In those dreams, he’s only nameless.

He doesn’t quite know which is worse; a name without a face to connect it to, or vice versa.

It doesn’t matter, he decides sometime before Mike calls. He can’t remember the face, and can’t remember the name once he wakes up.

What’s worse is this; he knows both face and name.

He knows. (And, he thinks he loves.)

It’s not just the boy that doesn’t have a face or a name, because neither does the others.

The girl doesn’t have a name, even though it’s scratching at the base of his skull. She doesn’t have a face, but by then she has a name instead.

The red-haired boy doesn’t have a name, and the fat boy doesn’t have a head half the time.

(The stump of his neck that’s left behind smokes, and the red-haired boy’s mouth gushes with water.)

The anxious kid fidgets, and can’t speak once he opens his mouth. Can’t speak, won’t speak, isn’t allowed to speak.

(His mouth is sealed with beeswax. His mouth is blocked by a river of blood.)

The dark boy gets a voice and a face first, but it sounds more like a bird’s squawk and talons against metal, once he remembers the dreams.

He throws up once he remembers Eddie Spaghetti.

He almost throws a punch when he remembers that _fucking_ clown.

It’s almost like the old times they don’t remember, and then Stan doesn’t show up, and the dreams somehow makes sense.

A boy trapped and shut up by blood and beeswax. A grown man in a tub full of water, soaked clean through to the bone by all the blood.

The human body contains up to 1,5 gallons of blood. He desperately wishes that he didn’t know that.

Stan doesn’t show up, but the clown does.

So too, does every fucking secret he’s ever kept inside the depths of his heart.

It’s not IT, that he’s scared of anymore.

It should be, but, truth be told, he’s far more scared of himself than he ever were of that fucking clown.

That’s all IT is; just another fucking clown in another fucking nightmare in another fucking room with another closed fucking door and another fucking secret and-

_Beep Beep, Richie_.

_Beep_, fucking, _Beep_.

He spins the token between his fingers, drops it into the flames, and exchanges those same old, familiar quips with Eddie.

Eddie. Eds. Eddie Spaghetti.

The spitfire kid finally has a name in his dreams. The sunshine smile has a face.

It matters, long after it’s been over for an awfully long time.

Deadlights is more than a fitting name to the spinning orbs of horror from an extra-dimensional clown’s razor-sharp jaws.

They’re Deadlights, because almost everyone is fucking dead.

Georgie. Betty. Edward. That little Matthew kid with his tricycle that squeaked every few minutes.

(Stan. _Eddie_.

Not yet. Never. Eddie’s not yet dead in the dread of the Deadlights. But, he doesn’t remember such horrifying things.

Horrifying things aren’t meant to be remembered. IT isn’t meant to be remembered.)

It’s only when he wakes up to that other dreaded sound; Eddie’s voice going a hundred miles an hour with glee in his smile and a giant band-aid on his cheek, that he doesn’t remember.

He doesn’t remember the claw through Eddie’s chest or the blood on his glasses. He doesn’t remember, until it is all far too late, and he wishes he’d never come back to Derry in the first place.

_I could have left_, he barely has time to think, when _IT_ lifts Eddie up and away from his useless arms that are still cradling the infinity of alien lights.

_I could have left, and never come back_.

He almost wishes he could forget after a while, because when Neibolt falls apart and Eddie is left behind with IT and every child that was never found, it hurts enough that screaming does the pain very little.

He wants to kill IT, again.

But, no amount of wishful thinking can ever bring the dead back to life. No matter the circumstance, no matter the person.

He almost wishes that IT wasn’t dead, only so that he could forget ever knowing anyone. He almost wishes he could forget Eddie.

Forget the pain.

Forget motherfucking Derry.

(_Beep, Beep, Trashmouth_.)

(None of this was ever meant to be remembered.

But it is so awfully hard to forget the horrifying parts.)

He held Eddie for half a minute, had him for zero. He’s guilty to no one but himself, but he owes Eddie so fucking much.

He held Eddie for less than a minute, and it was, to some extent, the rest of their lives together.

(He once kissed Eddie under a tree only Stan remembered the name of. _‘For practicing purposes,’_ they both explained, when confronted with the reality that they were thirteen and had never kissed anyone.

He doubts Eddie had enough time to remember it.

But Richie, for the sake of all the damn secrets, remembers it first. Mike speaks into a phone, and the first thing he remembers is a kiss under a tree.

It’s a secret, that’s why he’s not allowed to tell anyone that he kissed a boy who kissed him back.

Secrets make him sick. Eddie never did, even when he had a runny nose and his mother forced soup and pills down his throat.

Eddie, and the rest of the Losers’, were the one and only sane thing in all of Derry.

But, sometimes, not even sanity is enough.)

Someone hands him back his glasses; cracked and bloody and drenched in shitty water and full of once-forgotten memories.

He slips them on, but once he does, the memories is all he has, and his hands are still empty.


End file.
